


She Was Only a Whiskey Maker, But He Loved Her Still

by glorious_clio



Category: The Thrilling Adventure Hour
Genre: AU, F/M, Prohibition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-27
Updated: 2014-06-27
Packaged: 2018-02-06 11:16:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1856059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_clio/pseuds/glorious_clio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prohibition AU, and a little bit of my take on their first meeting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Was Only a Whiskey Maker, But He Loved Her Still

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [from the darkest greys](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/57808) by MariusPerkins. 



It starts, as so many things do, with a death.

Sadie Parker Knickerhouse had been raised in a brownstone mansion with her younger sister Lucy.  Mother was a true-bluestocking from England who married for love and money -- a bank owner, affectionately known as Father. Sadie and Lucy played with chemistry sets, telescopes, microscopes and various other science-y gizmos and doo-dads that allowed one to peer into the more private workings of the world. It soon became clear that while both were clever enough in the field, only Lucy had an aptitude for it.  

Sadie preferred to peer into the workings of the Beyond.  

Riding the coattails of the Spiritualist trends, Sadie had made a small name for herself in the upper circles of the society that indulged the daughter of a rich banker and his almost titled wife (even if said wife disapproved of her elder daughter’s Spiritualist leanings).  

Life was calm, and Sadie became bored with it at times. Specifically, nearly _all_ times.

All that was to change with the passing of Prohibition. Suddenly, there was a practical application of the chemical theories she and Lucy had learned at their mother’s knee.  Soon Sadie was brewing beverages much stronger than her mother’s Rose and Lavender teas.  (It helped that obliging English cousins sent alcohol disguised in perfume bottles.)

“Really, Sadie, you ought to stop this nonsense, settle down, and marry.  That nice Carter Caldwell would be a lovely catch for any girl. Why don’t you set your hat to him?” Mother would often ask.  

“He’s too safe in taxis,” Sadie took to replying. Implying that he was a _confirmed bachelor_ meant nothing to Mother.  Not that she’d never heard of homosexuality, but in her day, it was confined to boys’ boarding schools.  

Still, Sadie could not see herself settling down with anyone she dated (or with whom she outrageously flirted).  Mother did not know the men -- and sometimes women -- she dated; bootleggers and gangsters, writers and musicians, and once a black trombone player.  

Her life of idle fizzling changed into one of earnest self destruction after the market crash of 1929, when Father calmly launched himself from the roof of his bank to avoid the disgrace of many a’ fortunes lost with his legal gambling on the stock market.  

He wasn’t the first, and certainly wasn’t the last.  

-

Mother has never been quite the same (the scandal of a suicide!). She still has a small cushion from her dowry, and owns the house outright. Sadie dismisses all but one maid and the cook (no need for any of the groomsmen, Mother doesn’t go out anymore), and closes up the rest of the house.  No more would they host a Parker Knickerhouse party- it certainly wouldn’t do in the _current climate_.  

Mother isn’t completely unbearable.  

It is the haunting Father takes up that drives Sadie to distraction.  She is the only one who could see him, so she becomes his favorite by default.  

Sadie tries everything she can think of to get send him the rest of the way to his eternal reward, searches through tomes and grimoires, lights candles and chants spells in long-dead languages, but all to no avail. She falls to her last trick: batting her eyelashes and pouting.  

“Father, I’ve heard the other side is ever so lovely.  Oh, do give it a try, wouldn’t you? For me?” 

“Oh Sadie, dearest, not until I see you settled down and happy.  I have ruined your fortunes with my losses, and then the suicide...”

“You regret it?”

“I should have walked you down the aisle, my dear daughter.  And your sister Lucy.”

Sadie rolled her eyes.  “It is not better to beg forgiveness than ask permission in this case.” She chases her stiff rebuke with an equally stiff drink.  

“Darling, it’s not good to drink alone.”

“Alone is the one state in which I most certainly am _not_ in this house.”

“Well, all the more reason for you to go find yourself a gentleman, eh, love?”

Both her patience and her drink exhausted, Sadie throws a glass at (through?) him before going to walk through Central Park.  

He cannot keep up with her when she walks. Thankfully.  

She wanders the park, nipping from a perfume bottle of strong Bombay gin, stumbling blindly through the paths and past people who are clearly homeless, already ruined, though only six weeks into this “bad turn” of the stock market.  

Her mind is blissfully blank when she stops suddenly in front of the new Plaza Hotel - already famous.  

It looks like a castle (nevermind that she only just left her childhood mansion).  Perhaps she could live there. Perhaps Father could not follow her, if she guarded it in the correct way.  

But how to pay for it?

She casts her mind around and fumbles for her perfume bottle.  As Sadie drinks, an idea slowly dawns on her.  

Surely, they could give her a room... with a bathtub... and she could supply the entire Plaza Hotel with spirits. And eradicate other Spirits from her life. She could put a still (or two or three) in the boiler room....  More lush than even the 21....  

So it was that the death of Father caused Sadie Parker Knickerhouse to continue down the path of self destruction.  

 

***

 

It starts, as so many things do, with a death. 

Raised in the Catholic Church, Frank Doyle knows a thing or two about guilt. Among Father Lancaster’s many gifts, he could make anyone feel guilty with one look. And it is his fault that Catherine is dead (though it is also the fault of Lancaster’s, who recruited them both to do the work of God, that is, slaying demons for the Church).

He and Catherine fell in love when they caught each other sneaking into the North Sacristy and stealing the wine that was meant to be consecrated for Communion the next day.  

It made them feel warm and fuzzy and when you’re sixteen, that’s as good a reason as any to fall in love with the person passing you a bottle.  

But she was killed in the line of duty, and his life of idle fizzling changed into one of earnest self destruction. Though he left the Church, he was still haunted by Catherine, by the memories of the only scrap of happiness he’d ever found, by the promises they’d made to each other, by the guilt of failing her.  

And also by her ghost.

-

Frank Doyle knows a lot about the supernatural. But Catherine is a bit beyond his paygrade.

Had she been a spirit proper, it wouldn’t be quite the hell it is. At least he would have someone to talk to. But the exorcism of the demon that had killed her had also half-dragged her soul to the other side and she stubbornly clings to the veil between the worlds, shadowy and insubstantial.

Sometimes she moves her mouth as if speaking, but he can’t hear her. She tends to fade out if he looks at her too long, so lip-reading or supernatural charades are also out of the question. She just lingers, beyond all touch and sense, and fading from his reach as he strains toward her, like a particularly frustrating Greek myth.

Even having renounced the Church, Frank can’t make a living in the back alleys of Spiritualism. His last exorcism trapped his girlfriend in endless stasis, and to attempt another in her presence might send her to any number of hells or erase her utterly. The best he dares lobby towards the otherworldly is a glare and a stern talking to. He skims by on a little charm and a few trusty scams and a lot of cheap gin, until Prohibition puts the kibosh on the latter.

In an alley outside a speakeasy, he meets a man called Jones. Jones is remarkable, in that you don’t often see a man with the ghost of a pterodactyl following him around like an enthusiastic puppy. Frank remarks upon it, to Jonesy’s surprise. They get on like a house on fire immediately, and Frank is formally introduced to Harvey.

Here’s a laugh: Jonesy works for the FBI as a Prohibition agent. Here’s another: He gets Frank a job there, too. Turns out, the agency’s in want of the type with a knack for sniffing out booze seemingly out of thin air.   

The fact that it seems to evaporate before the lawbreakers make it to trial certainly cannot be pinned on Frank Doyle alone. After all, it’s a corrupt system.  The pair are bounced around the country, to blazing hot Chicago (where they spend a standout St Valentine’s Day), to the “Citadel of Crime” - St Paul (where they memorably drink with the mayor every night), to St Louis, even out west to California, where the grapes are grown to be made into legal wine for religious sacraments.  

Frank spits on the ground of every vineyard, to convey his contempt for the Catholics who will be drinking the wine.  Hypocrites.

Everywhere they go, Jones and Doyle find the liquor and make it disappear again.  And if the courts have no evidence, the thirsty cannot be tried.  It’s a neat little system, so long as Doyle and Jones keep moving.  

It’s a useless sort of life, without a living Catherine.  

He meets a demon now and then, but with Catherine’s shadow at his elbow, he is powerless to send it back to hell.  

Doyle has no family, none that would claim him.  The Church is not a place he returns.  New cities allow for the possibilities of new loves and new memories, but it’s all he can do not to throw himself onto the railroad tracks and wait to join Catherine.  

To his credit, Jones doesn’t question anything.  He keeps Frank’s flask full, and when the silent silver ghost of a woman joins them on raids and stakeouts and lonely drunken card games, Jones follows Doyle’s lead and falls more heavily into his cups.  

Once, when Catherine looked especially sad, he muttered, “It’s always a dame, isn’t it Doyle?”

Frank grunted in some sort of acknowledgement.  

“The trouble with dames is that dames is trouble.  More bourbon?”

“Of course.  No need to ask.”

Harvey is careful to leave a wide space between him and the silver lady, as if afraid her melancholy might be contagious.  

The fact that Frank cannot shake Catherine seems to tell him that he will never ever ever move past her.  He moons after his youth, unable to rid himself of the emotional weight he carries.  He idly wonders on trains to the next town if there is only one true love, and if Catherine was his, if this is why she is still bonded to him.  She is less visible these days, but she weighs on him more than ever.

They hadn’t married, but they had, well, committed a sin, if you were Father Lancaster.  Maybe this is why he sent her to what ended up to be her death.

Forgiveness was said to be the Christian way, but, Frank didn’t consider himself to be very Christian these days.  

So it was that the death of Catherine that caused Frank to continue down his path of self destruction.  

They are transferred back to Manhattan, and Frank struggles to breathe properly in between pulls from his flask.  

 

***

 

It starts, as so many things do, with desperation.

He hasn’t reached his quota for this year.  He’s heard rumors about the famed Plaza Hotel, so following a hunch, he tramps his way towards the castle of a building and steps into the cool lobby.  Walking in, he feels suddenly desperate, strained, like the deadline and the despair have become tangible. Sobriety is awful, he thinks bitterly, his mind on the empty flask in his pocket.

Stepping through the door, the feeling suddenly snaps, and he is fairly disoriented by sudden relief. There is a sigh, close to his ear, relieved and sweet. He spins back suddenly, but there is no one there.

There is no one there. At all. For the first time in years.

The sudden lack makes him ashen, and the sudden relief makes his stomach roil with guilt, but only hollowly. There had been no pain for her in her parting, and none for him, either, it seemed. Only numb shock.

Unfortunately, his shabby suit and sudden new hobby of starting with vague wonder into thin air immediately summons the manager.  

“May I help you sir?”

“No, no.  Mind if I look around?”

“Excuse me for mentioning it sir, but we do have a dress code here, and unless you’ve business here with one of our guests, I shall have to ask you to leave.” The manager raises an eyebrow, as if to suggest that Doyle couldn’t possibly have reason to be here.  Even a depression cannot excuse what Frank would generously call a suit.

The simper on the manager’s face brings Frank back into himself, with the quite unmystical desire for a bit of flashy oneupsmanship.  He lifts his coat so the lobby lights can glint off the tarnished badge of the FBI.  

The manager backs down.  

Frank wanders the halls.  As he makes his way up, the weight in his chest gets inexplicably lighter, as if he was drunker and drunker with each passing second.  But with a newly empty flask, this cannot possibly be the reason.  

He has never felt so bubbly....  

Frank decides to follow this feeling - all the way up to the penthouse apartments where people people actually live.  He bypasses all the doors until reaching one at the very end of the hall.  When he knocks on the door, he gets a shock.  

“Come in!” a lovely voice with a transcontinental accent invites.  

Frank grasps the doorknob (trying to ignore the slight vibration under his fingertips) and opens the door to (sorry, Catherine) the loveliest woman whom Frank has ever seen.  

“Yes, darling, how can I help you....” she begins, but seems to stall out. 

They simply look at each other, taking the other in for a moment.  She startles him when she stands and comes towards him.  

“I am Sadie Parker Knickerhouse,” she says, taking his hand and leading him inside.  The door shuts behind him. “Might I offer you a drink, Mr....”

“Doyle. Frank Doyle.  And may I ask you a question?”

“You may.”

“You are the most enchanting woman I have ever seen, but you cannot possibly have placed the entire Plaza Hotel under your spell.  Can you have?” he concludes hopefully.  

Her laughter is like French Champagne and he wants to drink it all in.  

She somehow fixes him a drink without letting go of his hand and they talk about Prohibition and how she’s protected the Plaza against ghosts, and how she hates going out now, but how often friends come to her. He talks about how he never wants to leave and she says she’ll have to buy him a new suit, so they can be married immediately.   

He agrees, and they both feel their ghosts slipping away as they become tipsy, then drunk, on the true love they stumbled into.  

“To us,” says Frank. He is holding the tumbler full of the whiskey she made with her own pretty hands and head full of chemistry.

“To you and me,” she agrees. She gently toasts her glass against his with a soft _clink_!

**Author's Note:**

> When I first started listening to TAH, Beyond Belief was the first segment I latched on to. I'm obsessed with the period of history from about 1900-1939 (in the US, in England, in Germany....) and it seemed to me that Frank and Sadie very well could take place in the 20's (even as it's completely timeless). Anyway, someone mentioned this AU on tumblr and I knew I had to write it. Thanks to a whole host of folks for betaing: Mansion, MusicalPenguin, and MariusPerkins. You guys rule. (It's also inspired by this playlist: http://8tracks.com/oldladysoul/from-the-darkest-greys) 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it. :)


End file.
